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Khatami Opposes Applying Death Decree Against British Author
Iranian President Mohammad Khatami has voiced opposition to a call for executing a death decree against British author Salman Rushdie, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported on Monday.
"I hope this repeated question which has been raised for the past couple of years will not be brought up again," Khatami told a local newspaper when asked if the question of Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" -- a book considered blasphemous to Islam by Iran - - was over.
Khatami's remarks came ahead of Iran's presidential election scheduled for June 8. Despite challenges from other nine candidates, the incumbent president was determined to be re-elected and to push ahead with his reform in the Islamic country.
"We should consider the question of Salman Rushdie as finished," Khatami said, adding that Iran has announced that it has no decision on the subject.
The hard-line Islamic Propagation Organization (IPO) reaffirmed the validity of the death sentence in February, ahead of the 12th anniversary of the "fatwa (religious decree)" against the British author issued by Iran's late supreme leader Ayatollah Musavi Khomeini.
"The fatwa against the apostate Rushdie is irrevocable. We ask our government to use diplomatic means to prevent the fatwa from being phased out," the IPO said in a statement.
But Khatami said that Iran was against any form of terrorism and vowed to launch a fierce battle against it.
"We explicitly announce that we are against terrorism in all its shapes, as demanded by our religious, moral and cultural mores and will seriously fight against this phenomenon," he said.
Iranian-British relations were cut off after the death decree against Rushdie was issued in 1989.
But the two countries decided to fully normalize relations in 1999 after Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi promised that the Iranian government would not take or support any action to threaten Rushdie's life.
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